Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Morris
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before distributing this or any other
Project Gutenberg file.
This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the
information they need to understand what they may and may not
do with the etext.
Edition: 10
Language: English
We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.
Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers. If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2001 as we release over 50 new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 4000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
*In Progress
We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.
As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
***
(Three Pages)
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
or [3] any Defect.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.
Beautiful Europe
Belgium
by Joseph E. Morris
I.
Yet even if German "kultur" in the end sweep wholly into ruin the
long accumulated treasures of Belgian architecture, sculpture, and
painting--if Bruges, which to-day stands still intact, shall to-
morrow be reckoned with Dinant and Louvain--yet it would still be
worth while to set before a few more people this record of
vanished splendour, that they may better appreciate what the world
has lost through lust of brutal ambition, and better be on guard
in the future to protect what wreckage is left. All these
treasures were bequeathed to us--not to Belgium alone, but to the
whole world--by the diligence and zeal of antiquity; and we have
seen this goodly heritage ground in a moment into dust beneath the
heel of an insolent and degraded militancy. Belgium, in very
truth, in guarding the civilization and inheritance of other
nations, has lavishly wrecked her own. "They made me keeper of the
vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept."
II.
"Viewing
As in a dream her own renewing."
One hopes, indeed, that the renewing of Bruges will not proceed
too zealously, even if Bruges come safely through its present hour
of crisis. Perhaps there is no big city in the world--and Bruges,
though it has shrunk pitiably, like Ypres, from its former great
estate in the Middle Ages, has still more than forty thousand
souls--that remains from end to end, in every alley, and square,
and street, so wholly unspoilt and untouched by what is bad in the
modern spirit, or that presents so little unloveliness and squalor
in its more out-of-the-way corners as Bruges. Bruges, of course,
like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely
amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though
certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant
canals. On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of
the better parts of Venice--the Piazza and the Grand Canal--and
lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat
faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the "Queen of the
Adriatic," there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her
monotone of mellow red-brick; and certainly nothing so
dilapidated, and tattered, and altogether poverty-stricken as one
stumbles against in Venice in penetrating every narrow lane, and
in sailing up almost every canal. Of Venice we may perhaps say,
what Byron said of Greece, that
Wander where you will in the ancient streets of Bruges, and you
will not fail to discover everywhere some delightful relic of
antiquity, or to stumble at every street corner on some new and
charming combination of old houses, with their characteristic
crow-stepped, or corbie, gables. New houses, I suppose, there must
really be by scores; but these, being built with inherent good
taste (whether unconscious or conscious I do not know) in the
traditional style of local building, and with brick that from the
first is mellow in tint and harmonizes with its setting,
assimilate at once with their neighbours to right and left, and
fail to offend the eye by any patchy appearance or crudeness.
Hardly a single street in Bruges is thus without old-world charm;
but the architectural heart of the city must be sought in its two
market-places, called respectively the Grande Place and the Place
du Bourg. In the former are the brick Halles, with their famous
belfry towering above the structure below it, with true Belgian
disregard for proportion in height. It looks, indeed, like tower
piled on tower, till one is almost afraid lest the final octagon
should be going to topple over! In the Place du Bourg is a less
aspiring group, consisting of the Hotel de Ville, the Chapelle du
Saint Sang, the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, and the Palais de
Justice--all very Flemish in character, and all, in combination,
elaborately picturesque. In the Chapel of the Holy Blood is
preserved the crystal cylinder that is said to enshrine certain
drops of the blood of Our Saviour that were brought from the Holy
Land in 1149 by Theodoric, Count of Flanders, and installed in the
Romanesque chapel that he built for their reception, and the crypt
of which remains, though the upper chapel has long since been
rebuilt, in the fifteenth century. At certain stated times the
relic is exhibited to a crowd of devotees, who file slowly past to
kiss it. Some congealed blood of Our Lord is also said to be
preserved, after remarkable vicissitudes of loss and recovery, in
the Norman Abbey of Fecamp; and mediaeval Gloucestershire once
boasted as big a treasure, which brought great concourse and
popularity to the Cistercian house of Hayles. Pass beneath the
archway of the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, cross the sluggish
canal, and turn sharply to the left, and follow, first the cobbled
Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai
Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble
cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the
adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and
gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in
mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford
whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet,
to overpower his "soberness of reason." "In Brussels," he says
elsewhere in his journal, "the modern taste in costume,
architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a
struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air
of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled
city is inexpressibly soothing. A pensive grace seems to be cast
over all, even the very children." This estimate, after the lapse
of considerably more than half a century, still, on the whole,
stands good.
One would gladly spend more time in this Antwerp gallery, which
exceeds, I think, in general magnificence the collections at
Brussels and Amsterdam; and gladly would one visit the great
fifteenth and sixteenth century churches of St. Jacques, St.
Andre, and St. Paul, which not merely form together
architecturally an important group of a strongly localized
character, but are also, like the cathedral, veritable museums or
picture galleries. It is necessary, however, to conclude this
section, to say a few words about Louvain, which, lying as it does
on the main route from Brussels to Liege, may naturally be
considered on our way to the northern Ardennes.
Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other
Belgian cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines.
The road from the railway-station to the centre of the town is
commonplace indeed in its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts
or stepped, "corbie," Flemish gables. Louvain, in fact, unlike the
two "dead" cities of West Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly
business-like aspect, and pulses with modern life. I suppose that
I ought properly to have written all this in the past tense, for
Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders. The famous Town Hall
has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who would better have
spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between these two
great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian genius
of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, "culture" could hardly
hesitate. The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an astonishing
structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing; but
one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models,
not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened
panelling and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles. The expiring throes of
Belgian Gothic were a thousand degrees less chaste than the
classicism of the early Renaissance: few, perhaps, will prefer the
lacelike over-richness of this midfifteenth century town hall at
Louvain to the restraint of the charming sixteenth-century facade
of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden. Opposite the town hall is the
huge fifteenth-century church of St. Pierre, the interior of
which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for
its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.
The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have
been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not surprising to
read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar
Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.
IV.
One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be
said of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle
disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the
rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not
altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true
glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its
marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth
of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with these
last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the Ardennes, with their
narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing indeed. Dinant, no
doubt, and Rochefort would be pleasant places enough if one were
not always harking back in memory to Malines and Ypres, or longing
to be once more in Ghent or Bruges.
From Liege, if you like, you may penetrate the Ardennes--I do not
know whether Shakespeare was thinking in "As You Like It" of this
woodland or of his own Warwickshire forest of Arden; perhaps he
thought of both--immediately by way of Spa and the valley of the
Vesdre, or by the valleys of the Ourthe and of its tributary the
Ambleve; or you may still cling for a little while to the fringe
of the Ardennes, which is also the fringe of the industrial
country, and explore the valley of the Meuse westward, past Huy
and Namur, to Dinant. Huy has a noble collegiate church of Notre
Dame, the chancel towers of which (found again as far away as
Como) are suggestive of Rhenish influence, but strikes one as
rather dusty and untidy in itself. Namur, on the contrary, we have
already noted with praise, though it has nothing of real
antiquity. The valley of the Meuse is graced everywhere at
intervals with fantastic piles of limestone cliff, and certainly,
in a proper light, is pretty; but there is far too much quarrying
and industrialism between Liege and Namur, and far too many
residential villas along the banks between Namur and Dinant,
altogether to satisfy those who have high ideals of scenery.
Wordsworth, in a prefatory note to a sonnet that was written in
1820, and at a date when these signs of industrialism were
doubtless less obtrusive, says: "The scenery on the Meuse pleases
one more, upon the whole, than that of the Rhine, though the river
itself is much inferior in grandeur"; but even he complains that
the scenery is "in several places disfigured by quarries, whence
stones were taken for the new fortifications." Dinant, in
particular, has an exceptionally grand cliff; but the summit is
crowned (or was) by an ugly citadel, and the base is thickly
clustered round with houses (not all, by any means, mediaeval and
beautiful) in a way that calls to mind the High Tor at Matlock
Bath. Dinant, in short, is a kind of Belgian Matlock, and appeals
as little as Matlock to the "careful student" of Nature. If at
Dinant, however, you desert the broad valley of the Meuse for the
narrow and secluded limestone glen of the Lesse, with its clear
and sparkling stream, you will sample at once a kind of scenery
that reminds you of what is best in Derbyshire, and is also best
and most characteristic in the Belgian Ardennes. The walk up the
stream from Dinant to Houyet, where the valley of the Lesse
becomes more open and less striking, is mostly made by footpath;
and the pellucid river is crossed, and recrossed, and crossed
again, by a constant succession of ferries. Sometimes the white
cliff rises directly from the water, sheer and majestic, like that
which is crowned by the romantic Chateau Walzin; sometimes it is
more broken, and rises amidst trees from a broad plinth of emerald
meadow that is interposed between its base and the windings of the
river. Sometimes we thread the exact margin of the stream, or
traverse in the open a scrap of level pasture; sometimes we
clamber steeply by a stony path along the sides of an abrupt and
densely wooded hillside, where the thicket is yellow in spring
with Anemone Ranunculoides, or starred with green Herb Paris. This
is the kind of glen scenery that is found along the courses of the
Semois, Lesse, and Ourthe, recalling, with obvious differences,
that of Monsal Dale or Dovedale, but always, perhaps, without that
subtle note of wildness that robes even the mild splendours of
Derbyshire with a suggestion of mountain dignity. The Ardennes, in
short--and this is their scenic weakness--never attain to the
proper mountain spirit. There is a further point, however, in
which they also recall Derbyshire, but in which they are far
preeminent. This is the vast agglomeration of caves and vertical
potholes--like those in Craven, but here called etonnoirs--that
riddle the rolling wolds in all directions. Chief among these is
the mammoth cave of Han, the mere perambulation of which is said
to occupy more than two hours. I have never penetrated myself into
its sombre and dank recesses, but something may be realized of its
character and scale merely by visiting its gaping mouth at Eprave.
This is the exit of the Lesse, which, higher up the vale, at the
curious Perte de Lesse, swerves suddenly from its obvious course,
down the bright and cheerful valley, to plunge noisily through a
narrow slit in the rock--